280 | Muslims’ Contributions to Science and Identity
the development of explicitly and self-consciously nationalist narratives of the
later decades. Furthermore, that authors like Ali Suavi and Mehmed Tahir felt
the need to “correct” European accounts of Muslims’ contributions to science
demonstrates that “Muslim” did not always serve as an entirely satisfactory label,
especially when it came to finding a place in the so-called history of humanity.
Strand Three: Turkish Superiority and the Dismissal
of Arab Science
Nationalist movements gradually flourished both in the Arab provinces and
among the Turkish intelligentsia after the 1890s. Blatantly anti-Arab statements
would become commonplace only after World War I and the establishment of
the Turkish Republic in 1923. But examples of such attitudes can be found even
in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates about science and the
contributions of specific groups to supposedly universal science. However, it is
worth remembering at this point that an emphasis on Turkishness had emerged
much earlier. In 1869 Ali Suavi had argued that most of the so-called Muslim
contributions to science were actually Turkish and that Arabs were essentially
transmitters, not scholars.
The narrative on Arab contributions was very much alive at the end of the
nineteenth century. But a third strand that gradually became more visible in this
period directly confronted this narrative, as an example from 1898 illustrates.
This confrontation started when the newspaper Ta r i k published an article titled
“Arabs Have Many Sciences That We Can Benefit From,” which was essentially
about linguistics and literary studies, with only a few additional remarks on Ar-
abs’ contributions to astronomy, geography, and medicine. Note that once again
the discussion on science—in this case that of the Arabs, not the Europeans—
had to do with defining the “we” who could benefit from it.
The response to this run-of-the-mill discussion came in the form of a self-
confident, if not aggressive, polemic exemplifying the themes of the third strand.
In an essay the young journalist Hüseyin Cahit wrote,
If we are supposed to be grateful to Arabs for those sciences, we can proclaim
without fear our indifference. The feeble astronomy, mechanics, and medi-
cine of the Arabs are now but a plaything compared to the progress in today’s
binoculars, machines, geological discoveries, and anatomical investigations.
If the books of the Arabs on these sciences have any worth, it is historical. If we
want to become a man of our age, we leave those books alone and embrace the
books of today to fill our minds with the sciences of today. And we find those
books in the West, not with the Arabs.Cahit’s blunt statements incited a reaction that once again illustrates how argu-
ments on science were inseparable from arguments about communal identity.